MEXICAN DRUG LORDS TAKE ON THE MILITARY

President Tries To Regain Territory Lost To Cartels

APATZINGAN, Mexico -- Mexican drug cartels armed with powerful
weapons and angered by a nationwide military crackdown are striking
back, killing soldiers in bold, daily attacks that threaten the one
force strong enough to take on the gangs.

The daily bloodshed includes an ambush that killed five soldiers this
month, a severed head left with a defiant note outside a military
barracks on Saturday and the slaying Monday of a top federal
intelligence official who was shot in the face in his car outside his
office in Mexico City.

Mexicans were shocked last week by televised images of kindergartners
fleeing their school during a grenade-andgun battle between
traffickers and soldiers that lasted for two hours in this small town
in President Felipe Calderon's home state of Michoacan.

The unrelenting bloodshhas forced a change in strategy for Calderon,
who sent more than 24,000 federal police and soldiers out in December
to reoccupy territory from Michoacan's poppy-dotted mountains to the
tourist-packed port of Acapulco.

Now, to supplement the massive presence of soldiers and tanks in
small towns, he's ordered the creation of an elite military special
operations force capable of surgical strikes.

"We are not going to give in," Public Safety Secretary Genaro Garcia
Luna said. "In the states where there is most violence, we will be
right there to confront the phenomenon."

The drug trade is all-powerful in Mexico. Analysts estimate that
cartels here make between $10 billion and $30 billion selling
cocaine, heroin, marijuana and methamphetamine to the U.S. market,
rivaling Mexico's revenues from oil exports and tourism. The gangs
also make billions through robbery, kidnapping and extortion of
businesses and would-be migrants.

The Calderon administration insists the crackdown is working -- the
government has already detained more than 1,000 gunmen and burned
millions of dollars in marijuana plants. Traffickers are being
extradited to the U.S. more rapidly than ever before, and police
recently made the world's biggest seizure of drug cash, $207 million
neatly stacked inside a Mexico City mansion.

U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency officials say it's too early to judge
the crackdown's success. Seizures at the U.S. border indicate the
flow of drugs north may actually be increasing -- 20 percent more
cocaine and 28 percent more marijuana has been seized in the past six
months, compared with the same period a year earlier. Violence
nationwide in Mexico seems to be increasing.The country's three
leading newspapers estimate shootouts, decapitations and
execution-style killings have claimed the lives of about 1,000 people
this year, on track to soar past last year's count of 2,000. The
government doesn't count drug-related killings, and a top federal
police official, Public Safety Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna, has
referred to the newspaper figures as the best numbers available.

This month's death toll for soldiers and sailors is the worst for the
military in more than a decade -- violence that shows the gangs'
desperation, officials say.

On Saturday, drug gangs left the head of a 37-year-old auto mechanic
wrapped in a sheet outside an army base near the port city of
Veracruz, along with a note that read: "We are going to continue,
even if federal forces are here." The grisly message came shortly
after the government said it was sending troops to the city to
respond to a shooting attack.

Many Mexicans fear even the army is outgunned.

"Calderon's war on drugs has been a big disappointment for us," said
Pedro Ortega, a family doctor in Aguililla, a Michoacan farming town
at the center of the drug trade. "The reality is that we are scared
to go out of houses, scared about what could happen to our children."

Aguililla was one of the first towns to receive soldiers.

Convoys of Humvees rolled down the streets, black helicopters
clattered low over the houses and soldiers at checkpoints frisked
motorists for guns. But residents say the military presence has been
sporadic since then, and most of the time they are left without
protection from the traffickers.

"There is no government here. We just pray to God to take care of
us," said 60-year-old Soledad Lombera, sobbing at a cross of candles
in her house, an alter she created days after her son Francisco Alvez
was found shot and buried on a nearby ranch.